@rrhoover Great question, Ryan! We believe this shift to chat as consoles for enterprise workers is early, but real and fundamental. There is just too much fragmentation of info, too much context switching across business apps and too many distractions to getting things done. Slack has led the way in this shift. We are huge fans of Slack and our company runs on it. Slack bots that automate work with enterprise apps, however, are like tips of icebergs. - These bots must have a deep understanding of each of the enterprise apps and their workflows to be able to mediate effectively between users and these apps to get things done. Workato team invented integration middleware at companies like Tibco, created two billion dollar products in this space and is bringing this understanding and technology to enterprise chat users via Workbot. For instance, to be effective, bots and their commands have to be personalized for the combinations of apps you use, how you've customized and use those apps. No two companies are alike in the regard, Workato's Workbot has been designed ground up to be easy for even non-technical users to tweak out-of-box commands or create their own to fit needs and patterns of their work groups. - There are a number of other enterprise chat products like Hipchat, Skype for business and others that are emerging from the likes of Cisco, Facebook, ServiceNow and more that also see an 'enterprise console' opportunity. Once integrated, Workbot and its commands will work with any enterprise chat application. The enterprise chat products are amazing at what they do and we get integrating apps and automating workflows. We believe that we are a perfect complement to these terrific products.

@rrhoover @vijaytella Totally agree with this. I think there's a difference though, which is down to the intentions of the founding team. Slack by nature, is very open and developer-community-friendly. In fact, I suspect that 2016 will see Slack (and HipChat) demonstrate the power of APIs for developers like Mozilla did with Firefox extensions during the early days. And with Slack putting together a fund for developers, it only backs up the theory that they are going to heavily rely on apps that are built on their platform. Unfortunately Facebook and Twitter burnt a few fingers. But like angels investing in startups, you can't be put off by one bad experience. Vijay is someone I know and he's one of the smartest people I've met. This will be a success for sure. As a partner of Slack and HipChat I get to see what's on the horizon for developers and it's all about the outgoing webhooks.

@paul__walsh @rrhoover "I think there's a difference though, which is down to the intentions of the founding team. Slack by nature, is very open and developer-community-friendly". Well said! Could not agree more.

@edwk Thank you, Edwin. It means a lot given what you've created!

@mihiresy Thank you, Mihir!

@mihiresy We're excited to provide integrations to @tradeshift customers. Thanks!

@vijaytella Awesome work. Can't wait to see the growth of this industry and what companies come out on top. Are you sticking strictly to work-based integrations at the moment or will you look at personal assistant style integrations too. travel/uber/food/etc (I guess they relate to work too 😛) This is like a Segment for bots & integrations. What were some of the main challenges here? I'm interested in many people starting bots because its becoming the hot new thing but not really thinking of the design process and making it a simple interaction. Using a bot should be more convenient than using the app directly, and not just because we are sat in Slack all day. What do you and your team do to ensure the simplicity throughout the interaction?

@bentossell Thanks Ben! We've focused mainly on work based automations. Workbot is like having your own smart and tireless admin - pulling together all the info you need for your work, prompting you in a timely manner to take actions and actually get things done. You hit the nail on the head that working with bots should be simpler and more productive and it not just about context switching back and forth between Slack and your other apps. Most of the work you do cuts across several apps. Say, when a customer files a trouble ticket, Workbot asks you if you'd like to know more about that customer and simply gets that info from all the other apps where there may be info about that customer. This is a tough thing to do yourself. Same thing when you want to escalate actions on behalf of a customer within your company. You can do it across say Salesforce (for sales), Zendesk (for support) and Jira (for dev) without having to figure this out each time. Makes sense? Some things we have done to keep things simple: - We created deep integrations with over 100 top business apps, so we do all the heavy lifting. This is our core background, having created some of industry's first and largest app integration products. - Apps can talk a lot faster than people can absorb. We cut down drastically on the number notifications by enabling smart filtering to deliver only relevant updates. e.g. only when high priority trouble tickets are filed or when a customer has more than 3 high priority tickets outstanding. - We maintain context of the chat conversation so we prompt you to take actions that make sense. - We learn the patterns of your work, so we can make these prompts smarter.

@vijaytella what other apps are you hoping to integrate in the future?

@bentossell We have big plans around apps! Briefly, A. We have out-of-box commands for the more popular apps like Salesforce, Zendesk, Github, Intercom, JIRA, Eventbrite, Box, Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, QuickBooks, Netsuite, Marketo, ServiceNow, Mixpanel, Twilio etc. B. You can, today, pretty quickly create your own Workbot Slack commands for any of these hundred apps. You can learn how to do this here. C. We are adding support for an additional 100 apps by mid-year, and D. Very soon, our customers and partners can add their own apps to Workbot and create commands, so we are not the bottleneck for their apps! Our goal is to make this a universal Workbot for all business apps. We started with nailing the experience deeply with the top 100 apps.

@tribaling Elle, exactly. You do not need one bot for each app your company uses. Even small companies use over a dozen apps and larger ones get into hundreds! Workbot can talk to them all.

@mlsj1 Hi Mario! Please see my note to Luis above on this question.

@akesoft Thanks Ake. We'd love your feedback

@akhanukov Thank you, Alexander. Really appreciate your comments. We'd love to chat! vijay@workato.com

@quinaluis Thank you, Luis! We come from a background of enterprise integration. Our focus from the start has been solving the breadth of workflow automation problems in a low cost, self-service product. This is why, from day one, we supported features like human workflows, long running tasks, powerful data transforms, intrinsic data filtering, descriptive business logic, enterprise level performance, scalability and security compliance and so on. Essentially an enterprise class integration service but with an UX inspired by the MIT's Scratch app for children. As a result, you will see our customers span small businesses, mid-market and larger enterprises.

@adamfeber Thanks Adam!

@heoj Thank you, Holly We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback when you try it..

@anthonygawonlee Thanks Anthony! Yeah, we are proud of our Salesforce capabilities and QuickBooks integrations. We have something exciting coming around testing in about two weeks. Stay tuned!

@markgrovs Thanks Mark. Yes, it's powerful when you bring the @workato integration platform into @slackhq !

@paul__walsh We hear you. Now, what if you didn't even have to ask? Stay tuned.

@markuszirn Don't tell my wife or I'll be automatically completing tasks without being asked ;)